Thursday, September 20, 2007

We killed The Lurker Below in Serpentshrine Cavern last night. It's an interesting fight. Basically, Lurker is a giant fish and you fight him on a couple of islands. He does a "spout" which is basically a beam of death. You have to dive underwater when he spouts to avoid it. If you kill all the trash, the water around Lurker is superheated, and does 500 damage every couple of seconds. If you don't kill the trash, the water has these crazy fish which will kill you very fast. There's also a phase with naga adds. It's a control fight more than a burn fight.

I really hate trash respawns though. The trash respawned after a few attempts, while we were still on Lurker's island. So we did this very complicated warlock summoning chain to get back to the platforms where the trash were and killed them again before finally downing Lurker.

Seriously, Blizzard, trash respawns are a terrible mechanic. Just let us work on the boss in peace and at our own pace. Heck, because of respawns we stretched the raid out an extra hour, just because we were so close. If the trash hadn't respawned, we could have killed Lurker and ended the raid on time.

Most guilds have their time constrained by outside, non-game factors. Adding extra time constraints in-game is unnecessary. The elite guilds who don't have outside time restrictions don't really care about trash respawns, and it's been shown to have very little impact on them. So why punish the non-elite guilds like this?

Posted by
Rohan

12 comments:

To make the experience last another week of course. While I hate them I see their purpose. The best in the world (which is what world first kill guilds are) will always be ahead of the vast majority. WoW has always been for the average punter it’s just that Blizzard got the formula strong enough to cater for the Hardcore and the Casual Joe.

Trash aside many congrats to you and your guild. We are still working on Lurker (Mostly due to solid attempts on him and trash respawns ironically) even though we have Mag and Voidwalker on farm for over two months.

Blizzard don't want you to burn through the boss in one raid. They want you to do it over and over again to "enjoy" the same content for a longer period of time. The dark side of mmorpg design - which just happens to be the same in medicine. It is more profitable to slow down a disease than to cure it.

Grats on your Lurker kill. I personally kinda like the fight, since there is no real enrage timer its much more laid back than most of the SSC/TK bosses. Everyone can take their time with steady dps instead of (for exaple the leo fight) "ZOMG 2 minutes till enrage go balls out/pull threatz!!!!!"

Just remember when the trash annoys you that the repop timer was 45 minutes until 2.1. Think about how bad that would have been.

I kind of wish they offered dummied-down versions of the high-end raids so non-raiders like me could at least check out the instances.

I would like to just go once and be done with it, the gear doesn't interest me since it has no resilience. If the risk & rewards were taken out, and it was just filled with non-elite level 70's with no drops, I would definitely check out the raid instances. I've tried to tag along with guilds during their runs, but for the most part they don't want you if you're not in the guild, or dedicated to the process. I've explained to them that I don't want any drops, and I just want to go once to see the place. I have the gear, albeit PvP gear, and the knowledge to complete the instance, but they still want dedicated nightly raiders.

I just want the one-time experience of downing these bosses, not the endless nightly grind for PvE gear. I quite raiding post-TBC with the introduction of arena gear, but that doesn't mean I would like to run these places at least once.

The way you describe the trash spawn, it doesn't really sound any different from respawns used in any other part of the game... as an instance time limit. A good example of this is Scarlet Monastery, where failure is taking so long that you have to fight to get out of the instance.

And honestly, it's a good gentle mechanic. It's fair for them to put a time limit, and much nicer than just kicking you out of the dungeon if you take too long.

Gz. We killed lurker a few weeks ago now and I agree about the sucky respawn timer on all mobs. It would be ok if they just did it so they respawn every day so you only have to kill them once a day - but then they just want to slow guilds down imo. GL on morogrim.

Remember, you're dealing with former EQ-raider babies. Tinfoil hat me all you want, but the random elements/respawning trash/general annoyances clearly created to drain time plus the excessive emphasis on raiding and minmaxing in TBC leads me to what I believe today.

i am an officer in a guild that is just getting the curator down in kara. we have 2 groups in there a week now and i see that as a huge accomplishment. we consistently see blizzard pandering to the 1% of folks who play this game at the end game by tuing this or changing that. how about adding, changing or improving the other parts of the game.

I'm kind of split on this one. I've beeen taking a bit of a break lately, but my guild had just started Kara before I left. I agree that it can be pretty irritating to take just a couple minutes too long killing all the trash up to Attumen, just to see it all respawn right before you're getting ready for the boss fight. In that case however, my gripe wasn't so much that it respawned, but rather that the timer was so short (25mintues from what I've read?). Granted my guild needed to move a bit faster, but geez.

On other fronts, I think Blizz has started to do a good job at addressing this by adding decent drops off trash as one of your commenters mentioned, increasing the timers, and "turning off" respawn once the boss is killed.

That just leaves the situation you described, where given the time taken to "learn" the boss, you get trash respawn. Again, I'm kind of torn on this one - it's not like we're learning from scratch given resources like wowwiki, wowhead, ampwow, etc. On the other hand, why make us go through all that trash clearing again just because we took a couple minutes too long. I'm also not a fan of getting rid of something JUST becasue it's hard.

In the end though, I think I agree with you. Either the timers need to be upped to allow for a decent amount of time, or there needs to be a "once cleared, stays cleared" approach in raids. Personally, I'd vote for the first approach, concuring with your other commenter calling this a "good, gentle mechanic". Yes, maybe we need more time, but should we get all night?